THE WARMUP

Welcome to Volume I, Edition VIII of The Sunday Back Page.

This is your Sunday morning sports section — built for the inbox and made for independent creators. Every week, the best sports writing, podcasting, and storytelling from people who own what they build. No institutions. No legacy outlets. No algorithms deciding what you see. Just great work. Every Sunday morning.

Yeah. That Arnold Schwarzenegger.

So do Codie Sanchez, Scott Galloway, Colin & Samir, Shaan Puri, and Jay Shetty. And none of them are doing it for fun. They're doing it because a list you own compounds in ways that social media never will.

beehiiv is where they built it. You can start yours for 30% off your first 3 months with code PLATFORM30. Start building today.

THE LEAD

Alex Cora won the sack race on Saturday.

This isn’t a medal to wear proudly like the winners of the Boston Marathon did earlier this week.

The Boston Red Sox stuck with Cora after he was suspended the entirety of the 2020 season for his role in the Houston Astros’ garbage can sign-stealing scandal.

Saturday morning, he was thrown under the bus for the failings of John Henry, Tom Werner, Fenway Sports Group, Sam Kennedy and Craig Breslow.

In England, the Premier League sack race is treated as a sport in its own right. Managers live and die by the table. A bad October can end a career. The back pages track each dismissal with the same energy American sports media reserves for playoff races. We don’t do that here, but The Sunday Back Page can appreciate the concept.

Cora was not even the most obvious candidate. The Mets, with the second-highest payroll in baseball, had just finished a 12-game losing streak under Carlos Mendoza, a year after they crumbled in the second half and just missed the playoffs. Joe Espada’s seat was warming in Houston. The betting markets had the Yankees’ Aaron Boone as the leading candidate for a pink slip to start the season. Boston moved first.

He’s not close to the all-time leaders.

Cal Ripken Sr. lost the Orioles job in 1987 after six games, all losses. What makes that one strange in retrospect is who was in the clubhouse. His son Cal Jr. was the franchise player, not yet the Iron Man icon he would become. The elder Ripken never managed another game in the majors.

Phil Garner lost the Detroit Tigers job in April 2002, also after six games. Most people don’t remember it. Garner died earlier this month, and the obituaries focused on his playing career and his time managing the Astros to the 2005 World Series. The quick Detroit exit was a footnote, if that. Some firings just disappear.

This one won’t. Cora managed the 2018 World Series champions. He is now the most visible casualty of an ownership group that let Mookie Betts go, watched Xander Bogaerts walk, and eventually lost Rafael Devers, too. The manager paid Saturday morning for decisions that were never his to make.

— Ian Powers

THE QUESTION

Who was the first Mr. Irrelevant of the NFL Draft?

A) Michael Reed
B) Brock Purdy
C) Tim Washington
D) Kelvin Kirk

See answer below 👇

THE READS

Each week, we curate 4-6 of our favorite reads from this week. The selections came from our own curation and from dozens of submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Our take: T.J. Highley is a mathematics and computer science professor at La Salle University who has spent years working on a specific problem: is there actually a way to fix NBA tanking, or is the league just rearranging deck chairs every few years? His answer is COLA — Carry-Over Lottery Allocation — a draft reform framework he and two students developed and submitted for peer review. The NBA votes on draft reform at the end of May. Highley has been on podcasts, talked to people in front offices, watched a Reddit thread on COLA rack up thousands of upvotes, and gotten ghosted by more media than he cares to count. The piece makes a serious case that the league has a working solution sitting in front of it and keeps looking away. Worth your time before the vote happens.

Our take: The Parquet Poet covers the NBA for people who think too much about the NBA. This first-round dispatch moves through VJ Edgecombe silencing TD Garden as a rookie, Victor Wembanyama face-first on the hardwood in San Antonio, LeBron James refusing once again to accept the premise that he should be diminishing, and the full chaos map of a first round that has already delivered an eight-seed beating a one-seed at home. The writing is more literary than analytical, and that's exactly the point. Good playoff reading.

Our take: Ben Gretch has been interpreting signals in the statistical and fantasy niche for a long time. He writes about the NFL draft the way a good analyst talks to you at a bar — digressive, self-aware, willing to follow a tangent about Alvin Kamara all the way to its logical end. This pre-draft essay covers the compressed timeline of a draft that felt like it arrived too early, what it actually means when the consensus says a rookie class is weak, and a genuine case for why athleticism at tight end deserves a longer look than usual this year. He's also honest about what he doesn't know, which is rarer than it should be in draft coverage. This one is behind a paywall after a generous free section, but what's available earns the click.

Our take: Zach Crizer writes baseball for people who want to fan smarter, and this is him doing what he does best — moving through the early-season noise with a light touch and actual data. The Twins are somehow winning without their best player hitting. The Pirates have Oneil Cruz playing center field, the way your Labradoodle is a guard dog. Mason Miller is striking out 76.7% of the batters he faces this season. The Mets had lost eight straight, and their offense has been historically bad — and Crizer takes the time to build a spreadsheet to show you how bad April weeks actually predict the rest of the season, which turns out to be: not much. Smart, funny, and a good reminder that the sport is built to make you overreact.

Our take: In 2020, Nick Underhill left The Athletic's Patriots beat — one of the most coveted jobs in sports media — and returned to New Orleans to build an independent Saints website from scratch with no financial safety net. NewOrleans.Football is now six-plus seasons old, staffed, and by most measures the most analytically serious team-specific site covering any NFL franchise. Peter Finney Jr. profiles him here, and the details are worth your time: the Saints fan who co-signed a $50,000 line of credit with no conditions and no ownership stake, the months Underhill spent tracking down VHS tapes and Reddit DVDs to chart all 8,742 passes Drew Brees threw as a Saint, and the wife who kept telling him his crazy ideas would work. A story about what it actually looks like to go all in on independent sports journalism.

THE LISTEN

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite podcasts. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Our take: A niche but essential listen for anyone who wants to understand what's actually happening on the ice during the playoffs. Todd Lewis runs scoutingtherefs.com independently and brings a level of officiating analysis to hockey that almost nobody else is doing. This episode covers how NHL officials are selected for the postseason, breaks down a high-sticking review that became a non-call — right call, wrong rule, Lewis argues — and eulogizes the career of retiring linesman Steve Barton. You don't know what you're missing on the ice until someone like Lewis shows you.

THE WATCH

Each week, we curate 1-2 of our favorite videos. The selections came from our own curation and from submissions by our readers. Thank you so much, and keep them coming.

Our take: John Hollinger and Nate Duncan built one of the more analytically serious NBA podcasts going, and this is them at their most useful — 81 minutes, series-by-series, before a single playoff game had been played. No reactive takes, no recapping what just happened. Just two people who have thought carefully about these teams walking through what they expect to see and why. If you want a framework for watching the first round rather than just watching it, start here.

THE PRESSROOM

The Bowtie is on Substack. Ken Rosenthal has been one of the most plugged-in baseball reporters in the business for decades — the Baltimore Sun, Sports Illustrated, the Sporting News, Fox Sports, MLB Network, The Athletic — and a fixture on Fox's television baseball coverage. He announced his arrival here and has so far shared two pieces from The Athletic. Nothing original yet. What he actually builds when he starts writing independently is one of the more interesting open questions in sports media right now. Worth following before the first pitch lands.

THE ROSTER

We want to celebrate as many independent creators on The Sunday Back Page as possible. Here are all the people who either submitted their work for consideration or were considered independently this week. Many of these creators deserved a place in this newsletter, and we hope they continue to submit their work. Please keep them on your radar.

Views from the 6th Borough | Gary “G3” Garrison | Kwame Twumasi-Ankrah | Jack Greven | Jack Minshull | Frank Cooney | Thor Nystrom | Dante Collinelli | Ric Serritella | Joe Marino | Jon Ledyard | Cory Kinnan | Jakob Sanderson | Kevin Cole | Jeshal | Justin Rogers | John Crumpler | Daniel Popper | Russell Brown

Want to see your independent publication featured here? Let us know. There are hundreds more baseball Substacks out there. Give me a shout!

THE ANSWER

D) Kelvin Kirk, a wide receiver out of Dayton, was the last pick of the 1976 NFL Draft, selected by the Pittsburgh Steelers. Kirk is the first player recognized as Mr. Irrelevant, a tradition begun by former NFL receiver, businessman and philanthropist Paul Salata.